Tag Archives: Tourmaline Queen

The Houston Museum of Natural Science was founded in 1909 - meaning that the curators of the Houston Museum of Natural Science have been collecting and preserving natural and cultural treasures for a hundred years now. For this yearlong series, our current curators have chosen one hundred exceptional objects from the Museum’s immense storehouse of specimens and artifacts—one for each year of our history. Check back here frequently to learn more about this diverse selection of behind-the-scenes curiosities—we will post the image and description of a new object every few days.

This description is from Joel, the Museum’s President and Curator of Gems and Minerals. He’s chosen spectacular objects from the Museum’s mineralogy collection, which includes some of the most rare and fascinating mineral specimens in the world, that we’ll be sharing here – and on hmns.org – throughout the year.

Tourmaline Queen Mine, San Diego County, California.
North America has produced some extraordinarily beautiful specimens of elbaite, a member of the tourmaline group, but the most admired are the bright red-pink crystals with blue caps found in 1972 at the Tourmaline Queen mine. The 24-cm example pictured here is the finest of the 33 major specimens recovered and is therefore the finest North American tourmaline. The lustrous, lusciously colored, undamaged pair of crystals at the top grow from an undamaged quartz crystal and are accompanied by smaller tourmaline crystals. It has been nicknamed “The Rabbit Ears.”